Almost exactly a year since I included photos of the Aegithalos caudatus, better known as Long Tailed Tits, flying onto the feeders, here they are again. I love to see them – always arriving in a group and flitting between the feeders and the Ceanothus.
Long Tailed Tits were birds I’d never seen until they came to the feeders at the smallholding in the 1990’s but they must have been more common in other parts of the country because they have a whole list of local dialect names (info originally from Birds Britannica ) but I’ve never heard of a Suffolk word for them, and they aren’t mentioned in my Suffolk dialect book so maybe they weren’t so common in Suffolk until garden bird feeding became popular.
Bumbarrel, Hedge Mumruffin, Poke Pudding, Huggen-Muffin, Juffit, Fuffit, Jack-in-a-Bottle, Bottle Tom, Bum Towel, Prinpriddle, Feather Poke, Long-tailed Mag, Long-tailed Farmer, Can Bottle, Hedge Jug, Bottle Bird, Barrel Tom, Patiney, Patteny Paley, Ragamuffin, Bellringer, Nimble Tailor, French Pie, Bottle-tit, Billy-featherpoke, Long-tailed Chittering, Puddneypoke, Bottle Builder, Dog Tail, Long Pod, Bush Oven, Oven Bird and Millithrum (Miller’s Thumb) – all names for a common English bird of hedgerow and heath – the long-tailed tit.
The one name that gets mentioned in poems by the countryside poet John Clare (1793-1864) is Bumbarrel – it’s thought this name for them comes from the oval dome-shaped nest they build. This must have been the common name for them in Northamptonshire, where Clare lived.
Emmonsail’s Heath In Winter
I love to see the old heath’s withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps its melancholy wing,
An oddling crow in idle motion swing
On the half-rotten ash-tree’s topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed.
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the haw round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels, twenty in a drove,
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again
and again in the May section of his book of long poems ‘The Shepherds Calendar’ he writes
Bum-barrels twit on bush and tree
Scarse bigger then a bumble bee
And in a white thorn’s leafy rest
It builds its curious pudding-nest
Wi’ hole beside as if a mouse
Had built the little barrel house.
and yet again in a poem about their nests
